Writer/Artist: Alan Henderson
Release Date: 17th October, 2015 (Lakes International Comic Festival)

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“Did you hear about the nutty professor?  He spent his life working… in macademia!”

Your reaction to the above joke will probably tell you everything you need to know about whether “Melting Pot”, the fourth printed volume of Alan Henderson’s Penned Guin webcomic, is for you.

This latest release continues the trend of quickfire ‘cracker jokes’ delivered by Henderson’s brilliantly straightforward penguins.  Sticking for the most part to the familiar three-panel newspaper strip style, this volume sees the cartoons loosely grouped into several themes; making a movie, putting a band together, the adventures of a detective penguin (or “Penguin P.I.” to you), that sort of thing.

It’s not all dumb ‘dad jokes’ though, as Henderson occasionally busts out a genuine comedic gem, such as the four-page running gag where we see a thespian Penguin delivering a line from a movie in a variety of different styles, from Jack Nicholson to Christopher Walken.  Brilliant stuff, and “Christian Bale Penguin” is quite possibly worth the cover price on his own.

The artwork is undeniably simplistic, but it really doesn’t need to be anything more complex for the format Henderson has chosen.  Some strips have a little more detail than others, but for the most part the gags are delivered by black-and-white (well, obviously) line-sketched penguins, and that’s perfectly fine by me.

As should be taken as standard for these kind of things, the quality does tend to ebb and flow a little throughout the book, with several groan-inducing puns and a fair few strips that miss the mark entirely.  The good thing about the simplicity of the format is the rapid-fire delivery; like a comedian unleashing a machinegun torrent of one-liners, if you don’t’ like one joke then another will be along in a second, and from my perspective, Henderson hits the mark a heck of a lot more than he misses in this particular volume.

At the end of the day, your enjoyment of this book is going to come down to personal taste.  If you prefer your humour a little more high-brow and your artwork filled with depth and detail, then no, “Melting Pot” is definitely not going to be for you.   But if you’re the kind of person who lets out a hearty chuckle every Christmas when the crackers get pulled, and who enjoys a great visual gag like this one…
 …then this is most definitely the book for you.  Henderson has undoubtedly found his niche here, and while it’s not going to be for everyone, as a pick-up-and-read collection of cheesy puns and gags, the Penned Guin does everything it needs to.

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This book will be available via Alan’s Bigcartel Store shortly, but you can pick up the previous volumes – as well as some of this other work – from the store as well.

You can also check out the daily updated ‘Penned Guin’ strips on their official Tumblr.

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The writer of this piece was: Craig Neilson-Adams (aka Ceej)
Article Archive: Ceej Says
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